The Internet wasn't just immaculately conceived as a mature useful platform. Nor was its journey smooth. Back in the early 90s, just connecting was a technical achievement in itself. It was mainly used by computer scientists, engineers, fringe groups and technically literate subcultures By the mid-90s, it had graduated to being potentially useful, but slow, clunky and more laborious than the analog version of the process in most cases. In the early 2000s, there was a false dawn, with VCs predicting the imminent ubiquity of eCommerce - which in fact took an extra decade to justify the hype. Bitcoin is following a very similar trajectory.(Daniel Batten)